September 2016 – Alphacution Research Conservatory

Navigational FinTelligence: The Method and the Madness

Navigational FinTelligence: The Method and the Madness

This post includes a metaphor, an anecdote and a vision. Ready? Here's the sketch: A magician - who was prone to playing the "long ball" - sought to develop the world's greatest card trick. True to form, the magician asks a volunteer to pick a card, sign his name to it, and put it back in the deck. The magician then claims to transport that card into a tree. When the tree was cut down immediately thereafter, the autographed playing card was found, encased in glass, nestled within the heart of the trunk. A weary traveler - and avid puzzle-builder - walks into the Louvre gift shop in 2002 and purchases one of the world's largest jigsaw puzzles. It was 8,000 pieces, when assembled, depicting an elaborate fresco created by Luca Giordano during the Habsburg Dynasty (known as "trigolo degli Asburgo"). The puzzle sat in its box until 2007 when - over the course of the next year - the puzzle was assembled on two adjoining sheets of 4' by 8' [...]

By Paul Rowady|2020-10-05T21:09:08-04:00September 23rd, 2016|Open|

Can (Digital) Transformation Be Measured?

Can (Digital) Transformation Be Measured?

A sextant is an optical navigation device used by sailors starting around 1730. With practice, it can prove quite accurate in plotting courses. Though the contemporary digital equivalent - a global positioning system (GPS) - has become the mainstream tool for navigation, sextants are still in use today among a small but avid group of yachtsman, survivalists and cognoscenti. Keep this migration in mind as we walk through today's question: Can (digital) transformation be measured? Our answer to this, of course, is yes - however, as in most cases, the specificity of measurement is data dependent. So, the qualified "yes" to this question, for now, relates to measuring transformation at the enterprise level. This is because the necessary enterprise data is relatively easy to find in the financial disclosures of the companies in our initial target sample. There is also rhyme and reason to starting at enterprise level because it plays squarely into our long term vision to define the total value of technology spending in the financial services ecosystem - [...]

By Paul Rowady|2020-10-05T21:08:42-04:00September 20th, 2016|Open|

Bank Technology Rant: You are Noah, This is the Flood…

Bank Technology Rant: You are Noah, This is the Flood…

Do you recognize this guy above? That's right. He's Captain Obvious! Captain Obvious is the guy who preaches to the choir; tells Noah about the flood... Get it? Good. Let's move on. Here's the translation for today's rant: "Noah" is a Top 10 investment bank, the "flood" in this case is McKinsey & Company, or - I suspect - any of the other global management consulting powerhouses. Today, I "learned" from both Financial Times and Business Insider the following (from the BI article, my emphasis added): "How are bank executives to cut costs? McKinsey's answer is technology...because technology seems to be part of the answer to every question these days." Now, just let the sweet wisdom of that pearl roll around in your gourd for a minute. If you're anything like I was earlier, you are now having a reaction like the one below (annotation not mine). I know, right?! Mesmerizing stuff. Thank me later for sharing the epiphany. Not SEEMS. IS! Technology IS a part of every solution these days, along with [...]

By Paul Rowady|2020-10-05T21:08:32-04:00September 16th, 2016|Open|

Back to the Front: Post-Trade Processing Getting Sexy-er

Back to the Front: Post-Trade Processing Getting Sexy-er

If you happen to hear the drumbeat of these things called "operational analytics" getting louder, then you just may be dialed in to the subtle downstream impacts of some of today's most common headlines related to financial enterprise transformation. For instance, the fintech revolution we are living through - with all its new-fangled and often overly-hyped gadgetry - is really about harnessing the opportunity for unprecedented process efficiencies. But, while it is a soothing distraction to daydream about deploying new digital tools during the ongoing regulatory hurricane, the economic impact that they will have on the FSI landscape is barely going to move the needle anytime soon. Of course, there are exceptions to this broad brush stroke: The impact of evolving IT infrastructure solutions from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to software defined networks (SDNs) to any number of other high-performance compute and storage tools are already sufficiently mature to be making a major impact on architectures and technology buying patterns. A similar statement could be made about open source big data tools such [...]